The aim of my blog is to share all the things I enjoy as I walk around the British countryside, including scenery, photography, history and nature. This includes reviews of gear bought by myself and my husband and places we visit, along with different articles on all kinds of walking related topics.
As the old saying goes, I'll take nothing but photos and leave nothing but footprints.

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Wednesday, 29 January 2014

Mountain Fitness....continued....

I'm
approaching the end of the fourth week of my Mountain Fitness programme and, to
be perfectly honest, things have gone somewhat awry.I was tempted to just ignore this fact and
not include a progress (or rather 'lack of progress') report in my blog.But that would be cheating!

The main
problem area has been with the sensible eating part of the plan.Over the past ten days or so I've eaten
anything but sensibly.Partly this was
because I took a week off work and during that week I had a few stressful
situations to deal with, such as having to say goodbye to a much loved family
pet and having to send my car to the scrapyard after an MOT failure.Food is a great stress reliever!As is alcohol.The end result is that I regained the weight
I'd lost in the first two weeks of my fitness programme.Undeterred I've started afresh.The important thing is not to dwell on the
relapse or to give up but to accept it and move on.

Happily I can
report that the exercise part of the programme (which is more important than
the diet anyway) has continued apace.At
the start of the year I set myself the goal of walking 1,250 miles in 2014 and
I've walked at least twice a day since then, clocking up just short of 125
miles and 10% of my target.Here I've
been greatly encouraged and motivated by sharing my walks with Facebook friends
in Scotland, the south of England and USA.We've done this by using the Runkeeper app on our phones and sharing our
progress.It's not a competition as
such, but every time I see one of my walking buddies has clocked up another
walk it spurs me on to add to my total.It's got me out walking even on a cold wet morning.I can certainly recommend this idea.

I've also
continued to struggle on with the exercises set by Anthony of Breathe Fitness
and can see some progress here inasmuch as they're becoming a little easier
every time.I've a way to go before I
can complete every repetition of every exercise, but it isn't designed to be
easy.One of the toughest, I've found,
has been the wall squat, designed to strengthen the hips and thighs - very important for getting up those hills!This exercise might not suit everyone, but if
you feel up to it and want to have a go, I recommend you try Anthony's wall
squat challenge which you can see in the following Youtube video.At the time of writing I'm struggling to get
to 20 seconds!This will, I know,
improve.

So, that's it
for now.Not a huge amount of progress,
but onwards and upwards is the name of the game!